Making Good in The Global South

ABSTRACT

This essay revisits Shadd Maruna’s Making Good from a Global South perspective. Widely recognised as a landmark in desistance research, Maruna’s work shifted the analytical focus towards narrative identity, agency and the subjective processes through which individuals move away from crime. The essay reflects on how these ideas travelled beyond their original empirical context and were interpreted within the Latin American criminological field. At the same time, examining Making Good from the Global South highlights important theoretical tensions, particularly regarding the role of structural inequalities, gendered pathways into crime and the limits of identity-based explanations of desistance in contexts marked by social exclusion. By situating Maruna’s work within debates in Southern criminology, the essay argues that engaging with Global South contexts can extend and refine desistance theory, opening the possibility of developing a more globally grounded and ‘southern’ perspective on processes of desistance from crime.